Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon CloudSearch

A fully managed and highly scalable search service that businesses
can easily integrate into websites and applications to deliver a fast
search experience

April 12, 2012 03:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN),
today introduced Amazon CloudSearch, a new service that allows customers
to easily integrate a fast, fully managed and highly scalable search
functionality into their applications. Developers simply create a search
domain, upload the data they want searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch
automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys
the highly tuned search indexes needed – as simple as that, the search
functionality is up and running. Amazon CloudSearch seamlessly scales as
the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes,
and businesses can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance
and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data
again. Amazon CloudSearch offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing with no
up-front expenses or long-term commitments. To get started with Amazon
CloudSearch, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch.

Prior to today, building robust search capability required dedicated
engineering teams who would spend weeks, or even months, provisioning,
configuring and deploying costly search infrastructure and software. On
top of that, companies had to hire search specialists to constantly
monitor, manage and adjust the search solution as traffic volumes
change. With Amazon CloudSearch, customers can now quickly make any data
set searchable without the additional cost and complexity of managing
and scaling their own search engine.

Amazon CloudSearch leverages the same A9 technology that powers search
for Amazon.com and provides businesses with high throughput and low
latency so they can deliver a fast search experience to their customers.
The service provides a rich query language that enables businesses to
search within particular fields, perform complex Boolean searches,
retrieve facet information, and specify the data included in the search
results. Setup and configuration is simple and easy to use as the
service automatically detects and recommends the ideal search fields
from a sample data set. Settings can also be easily customized from the
AWS Management Console.

ex.fm is a social music discovery platform offering a large collection
of free, legal music on the web. “Each day, ex.fm users add more than a
hundred thousand new song links to the platform. Historically, it has
been a challenge to provide our customers with a fast search experience
that can scale on top of this always growing dataset,” said Lucas
Hrabovsky, CTO, ex.fm. “With a small team of engineers, we can't afford
to dedicate resources to manage our search infrastructure. Amazon
CloudSearch takes care of everything for us – it scales beautifully and
is consistently fast. And our customers have noticed. Since deploying
CloudSearch in production, we’ve received very positive feedback from
customers about our search speed and accuracy.”

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization. “We
have integrated Amazon CloudSearch in Synapse, our informatics platform
for collaborative biological research that will serve as a public
resource for the scientific community,” said Michael Kellen, Ph.D.,
Director of Technology and Software Development at Sage Bionetworks.
“The search service built by CloudSearch will help scientists find and
use relevant data from a broad set of scientific resources. We have been
impressed with the power and flexibility of CloudSearch, and how quickly
we were able to use it to get a new search system up and running – we
had CloudSearch instances functional in less than an hour and fully
integrated with our application and deployed to our users in less than a
month.”

“For many organizations, search plays a major role in how their
customers experience their product or service - businesses need a
sophisticated search capability to help their customers find the right
information quickly. Implementing rich search functionality has
traditionally been very expensive and time consuming due to the
complexity of the technology required,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice
President, Amazon Web Services. “Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from
worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch
powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use.”

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key
infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now
widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud
computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and
turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no
longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or
months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's
expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business
needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon
Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost
infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands
of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190
countries around the world. AWS offers over 28 different services,
including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center
locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle,
opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's
Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most
customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything
they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the
lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of
unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books;
Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home
& Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health &
Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web
Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to
in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end
technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any
type of business. The new latest generation Kindle is the lightest, most
compact Kindle ever and features the same 6-inch, most advanced
electronic ink display that reads like real paper even in bright
sunlight. Kindle Touch is a new addition to the Kindle family with an
easy-to-use touch screen that makes it easier than ever to turn pages,
search, shop, and take notes - still with all the benefits of the most
advanced electronic ink display. Kindle Touch 3G is the top of the line
e-reader and offers the same new design and features of Kindle Touch,
with the unparalleled added convenience of free 3G. Kindle Fire is the
Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and
web browsing with all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud,
Whispersync, Amazon Silk (Amazon's new revolutionary cloud-accelerated
web browser), vibrant color touch screen, and powerful dual-core
processor.

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning
of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly
from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve
risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to
competition, management of growth, new products, services and
technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international
expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center
optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and
strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption,
inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More
information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's
financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual
Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.